Bloomberg's Jeff Green is reporting that a super-secret source at the General is claiming that they could build up to 60,000 Chevy Volt electric cars in their inaugural year of production — which GM product czar "Maximum" Bob Lutz is hoping will be 2010. It's partly because they believe the demand's going to be there and it's partly in order to drop the price on the plug-in electric sled to under $30,000 per unit. To put the number of units in perspective, that's twice the number of Prius hybrids sold in the first year they were on sale here in the US — which of course makes sense as gas prices are now twice as much as when the Prius first went on sale. Of course, there's...

...still a couple of hurdles for the big automaker from the D to overcome, like the battery technology that doesn't quite exist yet and completion of product development and all the other stuff that'll help determine what year they'll be introducing it in. Nevertheless, according to Green's source, they'll totally build that many when they're ready to start pushing them out of the door. Whenever that is. Why are we starting to think the next top secret leak on the Chevy Volt's going to be where they'll be building these 60,000 hypothetical cars? [via Bloomberg]